EVENTS

Ing gets email

The ONLY way for Hominid branching to be possible is through RACE. Yet you have a professor deliberately teaching junk science which completely DESTROYS the theory of human evolution by saying RACE DOESN’T EXIST. Do you guys REALLY want … to be known as a University teaching nonsense which destroys Human Evolution?

…

i am only a HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATE AND EVEN I KNOW WITH 100% CERTAINTY THAT THIS IS JUNK SCIENCE

Gosh. I’m only a university professor of biology, not AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews with a high school diploma, but I thought the key ingredients for speciation were reproductive isolation and subsequent divergence by drift and/or selection. Not “race”, which is a sociologically loaded term that is poorly connected to any legitimate scientific concepts. Does this guy really think that humanity is poised for branching into 3 or 5 or 7 or 63 (or whatever the current tally of ‘races’ is nowadays) species? Is the unit of any potential speciation event in our future likely to be what we label as ‘race’?

Does anyone know who AGuyWhosYoutubeChannelGetsMillionsOfViews actually is? I’d love to watch some of his videos. I’m sure they’re…entertaininginformativeamusing irritating.

Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.[1]

@3 Seems like an appeal to authority based on popularity, a twofer fallacy? But, YouTube popularity and the way it inflates the channel owner’s view of their own authority does seem to warrant its own lexical distinct label.

for the life of me I have never understood what the selective pressure that would involve race going forward since about the only differences are mostly superficial. Is the suggestion that humans will evolve by sexual selection and diverge like the Birds of Paradise.?
uncle frogy

Somebody, I think it was Dawkins, wrote that two siblings can wind up as ancestors in two different species. Not sole ancestors, mind, but when the divide comes, somewhere back up the line were siblings that split.

It made my brain hurt, and I haven’t written it right. But it serves as an example of race not being needed for speciation. Of course, any two “races” had sibling ancestors, too.

The variations that we could call “races” are related to the possibility of speciation, but the variations are not distinct, and cannot be clearly defined. If complete separation were to occur, and two species were to develop, there would be no distinct points at which one could say the different groups were different races, and then different species.

It amuses me that a great many of the “race” fans are happy to lump all of sub-Saharan Africa into one race. The genetic diversity within that “race” makes a trivial mockery of any differences outside it.

Though with human attitude toward sex and its place in our behavior I see no clear preferences within or between any arbitrary grouping that you can imagine
If anything we seem pretty indiscriminate
uncle frogy

Oh, I got that. I was just, in my limited little mind, combining Birds of Paradise and humanity and, in my mind, it looked like the Dr. Seuss people with body hair/feathers and weird top knots and such. Sorry for my poor writing.

So why exactly do you all believe this guy has a youtube channel with megahits?

Anyone with access to the internet (and basic computer skills) can create a YouTube video. And get megahits. It’s not hard to believe at all. Having a YouTube video is a mundane claim that doesn’t really need much proof to back it up. We’re not talking about someone claiming that they can part the Red Sea.

For reference where I work has nothing to do with the teaching part of the Uni we’re attached to. This guy I can only presume is mass mailing anyone connected or has focused in on the most obscure branch imaginable to pester.

Looks like a standard attempt to divide and conquer liberals by forcing a wedge between race and evolution. Unfortunately for him/them race is simply a casually tossed about catch-all term that really doesn’t have any meaning in terms of biology or evolutionary theory.

That’s the last straw. I’ve given him the benefit of the doubt over and over again, but this makes me lose any remaining shred of respect for Justin Bieber. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a shrine to dismantle.

He’s right! There are lots of races!
There’s the Boston Marathon, the New York Marathon, the Houston Marathon, Toronto Waterfront Marathon… and don’t even get me started on auto racing or horse racing…
*puts hand to ear*

Wait, their talking about “race” as though it is a species of primate? Well that’s just fookin ridiculous!

He seems to think that because it’s theoretically possible for humans to branch into separate species, and because such branching happened in the past with our ancestor species, therefore it must also be a fact that the current population of humans actually has branched into meaningfully separate populations, regardless of the state of the evidence.

Likewise, he seems to view the rejection of a specific claim of branching to be a rejecting of the very notion that organisms can branch at all. I think that’s how he gets from rejection of racism to rejection of evolution.

It’s hard to tell for sure since he’s so bad at clearly explaining himself. Then again, these positions are so mind-bogglingly stupid that it may be best if he doesn’t explain it too much. If he should ever regain his senses, he’ll want a way to pretend that that’s not really what he meant.

I’ve had the misfortune to meet somebody who tried to tell me humanity was a ring species.

Well, we do tend to wear a lot of them on our fingers.

Menyambal:

It amuses me that a great many of the “race” fans are happy to lump all of sub-Saharan Africa into one race. The genetic diversity within that “race” makes a trivial mockery of any differences outside it.

That was my first thought on reading that rant and is the best evidence that race is a highly arbitrary social construct.